Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Day 7, a whole week!

In 1898, with the infantry from Illinois,the boy who would become the poet Sandburgrowed his captain's Saint Bernard ashoreat Guánica, and watched as the captainlobbed cubes of steak at the canine snout.The troops speared mangos with bayonetslike many suns thudding with shredded yellow fleshto earth. General Miles, who chained Geronimofor the photograph in sepia of the last renegade,promised Puerto Rico the blessings of enlightened civilization.Private Sandburg marched, peeking at a booknested in his palm for the words of Shakespeare.

Dazed in blue wool and sunstroke, they stumbled up the mountainto Utuado, learned the war was over, and stumbled away.Sandburg never met great-great-grand uncle Don Luis,who wore a linen suit that would not wrinkle,read with baritone clarity scenes from Hamlethouse to house for meals of rice and beans,the Danish prince and his soliloquy—ser o no ser— saluted by rum, the ghost of Hamlet's father wanderingthrough the ceremonial ballcourts of the Taíno.

In Caguas or Cayey Don Luiswas the reader at the cigar factory,newspapers in the morning,Cervantes or Marx in the afternoon,rocking with the whirl of unseen swordwhen Quijote roared his challenge to giants,weaving the tendrils of his beard when he spokeof labor and capital, as the tabaquerosrolled leaves of tobacco to smolder in distant mouths.

Maybe he was the man of the same namewho published a sonnet in the magazine of browning leavesfrom the year of the Great War and the cigar strike.He disappeared; there were rumors of Brazil,inciting canecutters or marrying the patrón's daughter,maybe both, but always the reader, whipping Quijote's sword overhead.

Another century, and still the warships scavengePuerto Rico's beaches with wet snouts. For practice,Navy guns hail shells coated with uranium over Viequeslike a boy spinning his first curveball;to the fisherman on the shore, the lung is a netand the tumor is a creature with his own face, gasping.

This family has no will, no house, no farm, no island.But today the great-great-great-grand nephew of Don Luis,not yet ten, named for a jailed poet and fathered by another poet,in a church of the Puritan colony called Massachusetts,wobbles on a crate and grabs the podiumto read his poem about El Yunque waterfallsand Achill basking sharks, and shouts:I love this.